Getting Fancy

Memcached

We slipped this in with the basic install. The package was libmemcached-dev on Ubuntu and libmemcached on OS X. Switch your settings_local.py to use

CACHE_BACKEND = 'caching.backends.memcached://localhost:11211?timeout=500'

RabbitMQ and Celery

See the Celery page for installation instructions. The example settings set CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER = True. If you’re setting up Rabbit and want to use celeryd, make sure you remove that line from your settings_local.py.

Sphinx

On OS X the package is called sphinx. Once you have it installed, run these two commands from the zamboni root to get it running:

indexer -c configs/sphinx/sphinx.conf --all
searchd -c configs/sphinx/sphinx.conf

There will probably be warnings and lots of verbose output because Sphinx sucks like that, but it usually works.

elasticsearch

See elasticsearch for more instructions.

Redis

On OS X the package is called redis. Get it running with the launchctl script included in homebrew. To let zamboni know about Redis, add this to settings_local.py:

CACHE_MACHINE_USE_REDIS = True
REDIS_BACKEND = 'redis://'

The REDIS_BACKEND is parsed like CACHE_BACKEND if you need something other than the default settings.

LESS CSS

We’re slowing switching over from regular CSS to LESS. You can learn more about LESS at http://lesscss.org.

If you are serving your CSS from the same domain as the page, you don’t need to do anything. Otherwise, see “Installing LESS (alternative)” below.

You can make the CSS live refresh on save by adding #!watch to the URL or by adding the following to your settings_local.py:

LESS_LIVE_REFRESH = True

If you want syntax highlighting, try:

• vim: http://leafo.net/lessphp/vim/
• emacs: http://jdhuntington.com/emacs/less-css-mode.el
• TextMate: https://github.com/appden/less.tmbundle
• Coda: http://groups.google.com/group/coda-users/browse_thread/thread/b3327b0cb893e439?pli=1

Installing LESS (alternative)

You only need to do this if your CSS is being served from a separate domain, or if you’re using zamboni in production and running the build scripts.

If you aren’t serving your CSS from the same domain as zamboni, you’ll need to install node so that we can compile it on the fly.

First, we need to install node, npm and LESS:

brew install node
curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh
npm install less

If you type lessc, it should say “lessc: no input files.”

Next, add this to your settings_local.py:

LESS_PREPROCESS = True
LESS_BIN = 'lessc'

Make sure LESS_BIN is correct.

Not working?

• If you’re having trouble installing node, try http://shapeshed.com/journal/setting-up-nodejs-and-npm-on-mac-osx/. You need brew, which we used earlier.
• If you’re having trouble with npm, check out the README on https://github.com/isaacs/npm
• If you can’t run LESS after installing, make sure it’s in your PATH. You should be able to type “lessc”, and have “lessc: no input files” returned.